Hardness is the capability to make the future more certain.
Ethereum offers us hardness. We can give Ethereum code and receive a very strong guarantee that it will run any time we call on it. We can give Ethereum data and know with certainty it will still be available in the future, unaltered and uncorrupted.
These simple building blocks give rise to more complex forms of coordination. Money. Contracts. Governance. Identity. Today Ethereum is the hard foundation of a digital economy where millions collaborate across time and space and nation.
Hardness lets us control the future in the small ways necessary to enable large scale coordination. We take strands of possible futures and collapse them into something specific and strong, like a cord of rope. Firmly anchored, we can step into the future confident it will bear our weight.
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Blockchains like Ethereum are not the only source of hardness. There are two other sources of hardness we rely on all the time: institutions and atoms.
Over the centuries we have built institutions that are reliable enough to serve as a source of hardness. Governments and legal systems are the source of hardness we used to create property rights, contracts, and a modern economy.
Atoms, and other basic properties of our world, also give us the hardness required for some complex social structures. Gold can serve as money because its supply is limited - not by the rules of any institution, but as a result of the physical properties of our earth.
Only recently, after the invention of blockchains, have we begun to realize that these three things share a common underlying property. It is not a coincidence we make money out of them, or that we can use either institutions or blockchains to create contracts.
All of them give us the ability to constrain the future, to make parts of it more certain, fixed points strong enough to coordinate around.
If law, money, and government are the infrastructure of our civilization, then atoms, institutions, and blockchains like Ethereum are the raw materials this infrastructure is built with.
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This is the problem Ethereum solves. It offers us a new source of hardness, one that can do things and go places that institutional hardness and atom hardness cannot:
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Ethereum is a decentralized source of hardness. It is not under the control of any centralized institution like a company or government. It strives to be accessible to every human being, built in a way that no one can prevent you from accessing or using it.
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Ethereum is digital and global. Anyone with an internet connection can use it. Ethereum and the network of L2s built on top of it will form a seamless, interoperable platform for hardness. But institutional hardness is fragmented by nation state borders, and slow to adapt to the needs of a technological civilization.
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Ethereum is transparent and auditable. We can verify, instead of naively trusting. Anyone can validate the chain for themselves using simple tools. Every year, those tools will become easier, faster, and more lightweight, until almost any device can reach out and touch Ethereum’s hardened surface for itself.
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Ethereum’s hardness does not depend on the political winds. Ethereum’s contracts and property rights don’t stop working if your government does. Ethereum’s data won’t be taken away from you by a change to a corporation’s terms of service. When that matters, it matters a lot.
This helps make sense of why some blockchains are not very interesting: they are just centralized institutions in disguise. That might be a good way to be an institution, but it isn’t a novel contribution to humanity’s sources of hardness.
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Blockchains like Ethereum will not replace institutions as our only source of hardness. But they will compete with and complement them. Humans now have options: there is a market for hardness. Ethereum-hardness will be used where institutions falter or cannot go, and institution-hardness will fill the gaps where human discretion or intent is necessary to create a system usable by humans.
Just as an architect must carefully plan not only the design of a building, but the materials used to construct that design, so must we carefully consider the materials for our civilization’s infrastructure.
What do we want our civilization to be made of?